Teaching requirements analysis to computer science and information system students raises a number of challenges. One of the most critical is the gap between skills needed to deal with software requirements and those necessary to grasp the business problems. To bridge that gap in teaching requirements analysis students would have to carry out an assignment of analyzing requirements for a non-trivial, term-sized project. Here we analyze the gap and propose a framework for student projects which integrates a model of the computer based system as a solution to business challenges into a template for a business requirements document. The first model comes from information systems literature and the second from an object oriented analysis approach for business analysis. A CASE (computer aided software engineering) tool to support UML (unified modeling language) modeling is also used and we give some guidelines to reduce risks of premature requirements modeling due to students’ tendency to start modeling, even if business analysis and requirements elicitation have just started. The proposed framework has been defined in many years of teaching and allowed to overcome some of the limitations of a traditional UML-focused course. Student projects of different academic terms – in different courses and different degrees – showed improved requirements models and better comprehension of the role of requirements in the later terms. Moreover, the students appeared to have greater interest and motivation towards this area of software engineering.

Teaching requirements analysis to computer science and information system students raises a number of challenges. One of the most critical is the gap between skills needed to deal with software requirements and those necessary to grasp the business problems. To bridge that gap in teaching requirements analysis students would have to carry out an assignment of analyzing requirements for a non-trivial, term-sized project. Here we analyze the gap and propose a framework for student projects which integrates a model of the computer based system as a solution to business challenges into a template for a business requirements document. The first model comes from information systems literature and the second from an object oriented analysis approach for business analysis. A CASE (computer aided software engineering) tool to support UML (unified modeling language) modeling is also used and we give some guidelines to reduce risks of premature requirements modeling due to students’ tendency to start modeling, even if business analysis and requirements elicitation have just started. The proposed framework has been defined in many years of teaching and allowed to overcome some of the limitations of a traditional UML-focused course. Student projects of different academic terms – in different courses and different degrees – showed improved requirements models and better comprehension of the role of requirements in the later terms. Moreover, the students appeared to have greater interest and motivation towards this area of software engineering.